daniel bjarnason: over light earth

This is the award-winning Icelandic composer's second solo album and third release on Bedroom Community -- hot on the heels of his Sólaris collaboration with label-mate Ben Frost. Daníel Bjarnason's critically-acclaimed debut album Processions was hailed by Time Out New York as "coming eerily close to defining classical music's undefinable brave new world." On "Over Light Earth," the intensity of Bjarnason's orchestral voice is captured through meticulous close-micing and multi-tracking, a recording process that sets this recording radically apart from that of conventional orchestral recordings. This album is very much the fruit of Bjarnason's ongoing and intimate symbiosis with Bedroom Community's Valgeir Sigurðsson. Here, with engineer Paul Evans and the newly-formed Reykjavík Sinfonia, they have produced a suitably unconventional symphonic recording. As much at home in the recording studio as he is on the conductor's podium, it's no wonder Bjarnason is equally effective in collaboration with other sonic architects, whether it's the band Sigur Rós or his Bedroom Community label-mates. Over Light Earth comprises three major works. The title-piece was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is Bjarnason's sonic nod towards the work of painters Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. The second -- the aptly-titled "Emergence" -- suggests a vast, pre-existing form just coming into view with steady harmonies manifesting in a range of unstable attacks, hesitations and anticipations. The final piece -- "Solitudes" -- is an early work that is in fact Bjarnason's first piano concerto, here reworked with electronics by Sigurðsson and Frost, demonstrating Bjarnason's mastery of more complex harmonies and melodies. It's between the simple elements and more abstract materials -- between harmonic motion and pure gesture -- that we can hear Daníel Bjarnason's compositional voice itself beginning to emerge.